Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

After 1933, with the appointment as governor of Italo Balbo, one of the most popular figures among the Fascist leadership, Italian settlement projects would gain new impetus, culminating in the dramatic Veintemila episode. In 1938, Balbo organized in grand style a fleet of seventeen ships that brought in about 20,000 colonists to occupy the 26 new model villages designed by Italian planners.[101] He fashioned himself the general of an “army of rural infantry,” commanding “the rural masses… moving in compact formations, perfectly organized, to take on the grand work of colonization” and that contrasted with the disorganized emigration fluxes of previous generations.[102] Settlers selected from the populations of overpopulated regions of Italy had cardboard labels sewed to their clothes, each color coding a person’s destination in Libya. In 1939, while Hitler was invading Poland, conquering land for German settlers who were organized in similar terms by the SS Race and Settlement Office, Balbo brought 10,000 new settlers into the Libyan colony. E. J. Russell, the director of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, described the undertaking as “far the largest group settlement ever undertaken its progress,” asserting that the Balbo’s initiative would be “watched with the deepest interest by all concerned with colonization, and certainly by many administrators in the British Empire.”[103]

The presence of Karakul in Libya was, of course, connected to ambitious plans for settling the territory of Cyrenaica. Karakul farms, such as the one established by the Societá d’Oltremare at El Abiar, near Bengasi,[104] the largest of Cyrenaica’s cities, made sense only after the clearing and seizure of land undertaken by the pacification campaign.[105] Already in 1932, the year Cyrenaica was pacified, Maiocco had been asked by the head for animal breeding at the Sidi Mesri Experiment Station in Libya to deliver two Karakul rams and four ewes.[106] The animals arrived in the colony in May 1934 with certificates from the Zootechnic Institute of Prague, whose flock had been started, not surprisingly, with animals from Halle. Three months after the arrival of the six Karakul in Libya, one of the expensive rams died, and as a result the crossing experiments with the local fat-tail breed, the barbaresca, had to be conducted with a single Karakul ram. In subsequent years, the Istituto Nazionale de Coniglicoltura would ship rams from its own flock to local experiment stations scattered through the Italian Empire to cross them with local breeds.[107] Besides Libya, Alessandria pureblood Karakul would also find their way to Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, the Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa), as the region was to be known after Italia’s ruthless conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. But Francesco Maiocco was the first to recognize that, independently of the growth pace of his Alessandria flock, this would always be too small to accomplish the grand plans aimed at Karakul sustaining Italian communities in the semiarid areas of the empire.[108] The problem was more serious when the increasing difficulty of purchasing Karakul rams all over the world was taken into consideration. After the international sanctions against Italy for its Ethiopian invasion, Russia and South West Africa, the world’s two main producers, forbade any commerce with the country, and the rams were extremely expensive in Germany—12,000 RM in 1939, in a time of extreme scarcity of foreign currency in the Italian economy. All these difficulties supported Maiocco’s contention that the development of Karakul farms was completely dependent on his institute, which was not able to deliver more than a hundred purebred rams by the end of 1939.[109] In good conditions these rams would be able to fertilize in one year about 4,000 local ewes—not enough to satisfy the national demand for Persian fur pelts.

The solution was to be found in making intensive use of artificial-insemination techniques, which were being developed at the recently founded Lazzaro Spallanzani Institute in Milan, inspired by German and Soviet experiments.[110] It is good to remember that artificial insemination was also one of the main areas of expertise to be developed at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Animal Breeding. Telesforo Bonadonna, the director of the Lazzaro Spallanzani Institute, traveled to both Germany and the Soviet Union and brought back instruments with which he began to inseminate cows and sheep. In both Germany and the Soviet Union, Karakul had been used already as a model organism in artificial-insemination experiments. Bonadonna’s research in Italy would contribute to enlarging the community of scholars structured around Karakul.